Snail Beauty Products – How True Is it?
Are you attending a gala this weekend? Then you got to look your best as a celebrity in a red carpet in Hollywood. From the glamorous attire, brilliant and expensive accessories to makeup. The entire makeup preparation starts with rejuvenating your skin with a Snail spa. Yes, you heard it right, a “Snail”. Like the actual Gastropod that has a huge Shell on it’s back that belongs to the classification phylum Mollusca (or Mollusks). If this is the first time you have heard of Snails being used in a Beauty regimen, then stick around. We are exploring what they say is a new breakthrough in anti-aging research. Some even coined this the new “Fountain of Youth”.
Introduction
There are a variety of ways they are using snails in anti-aging beauty regimens. The most common way is by using what is commonly known as Snail oil or snail mucin/filtrate. They say that it is packed with anti-aging nutrients like hyaluronic acid, glycoprotein, proteoglycans, and antimicrobial and copper peptides which some of these you know are active ingredients of anti-aging beauty products. So just by simply looking at this, there might be some truths to this gross but could be an amazing breakthrough.
Where did it start?
You might have heard of this just now but would you be surprised that using snails as a beauty regiment has been used as far back as ancient times by the Greeks to reduce skin inflammation as mentioned by New York magazine in their article.
What is the science behind the snail slime?
What exactly can you find in a snail filtrate that makes is popular with the major beauty-conscious Asian countries like Thailand, Japan and Korea? The answer to that is the mucus that it secretes as it crawls along to prevent drying out of their tissue. There is a Snail farm here in Thailand that manually collects the mucus in a snail farm. It is just an hour flight from Rawai, Phuket to Bang Rak, Bangkok. They have around 8,000 native Hemiplecta distincta snails, that moves around freely in the 16,000 square meter farm and thousands of workers manually collect their mucus as they move around.
Users of this product claim that a variety of benefits could vary from smoothening skins to wrinkle removal. They say this is due to the mucus’ ability in enhancing the production of collagen and elastin in the user’s skin. This sounds more like Quackery if you ask me but there is a science to all this. The snail filtrate contains Anti-microbial peptides, glycolic acid, allantoin, hyaluronic acid, anti-oxidants, and vitamins A, D, and E. In terms of cosmetic research, each of these nutrients can aid skin health.
Conclusion: Is Snail Beauty products worth all the hype?
Same with any beauty procedure and cosmetic products, there are no peer-reviewed products that can prove signs of reverse aging. Just like an egg or milk, you can look at snail filtrates as a high protein based moisturizers. Make sure you are getting the worth of what you are paying for. Because with all this hype, there is no way to guarantee consistency in what the snails produce with regards to active compounds. There are a variety of environmental conditions, extraction methods and storage that might affect the quality and of course potency. This is the very reason why it is not recommended to create your own DIY Snail Spas or Snail Mucus products.
In addition to that, there are products that would ride the hype and would advertise that their brand as “Snail-based” but if you would look at the PPM (parts per million), it is quite small to even be considered an active ingredient. There are tried and tested methods like Ultheraphy that can achieve similar if not better results at a lesser risk and you can observe that the regenerative process is initiated right away so most patients are able to see an immediate facelift and skin regeneration on your first treatment.
